Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: On-Page Optimization

Explore on-page optimization and its role in a larger SEO strategy.


  • Hi Seomoz'ers, Currently I am analyzing the best possible strategy which situation is as follow: I am having a blog with a great EMD about a specific product we are selling. The blog is currently ranking in position 1 for different keyword phrases. However I would like to make a switch from the current Wordpress blog to Magento webshop. Simply because the product should be sold through a professional webshop with many related products. Only the homepage of mydomainname.com is optimized. I am affraid I will lose my #1 ranking when I put my webstore online on this domainname. Most likely I will lose my PA and keep my DA. Which actions should I take in order to keep the ranking in Google position 1 with the new webstore? My best possible option I guess: 1. Replace the Wordpress blog with the Magento webstore and optimize the homepage with on-page seo of the webstore for the targeted keywords. Will this work? As the backlinks I've built are pointing all to the domainname.com (homepage). Thanks in advance. Any more suggestions are welcome 🙂

    | Falcopa
    0

  • Thanks Mozzers in advance for any insight into what I'm sure is a basic SEO question. I'm working with a resort in the great state of Maine.  Their home page title reads Maine Resorts, Resorts in Maine, (company name). The site has about 400 URL's and over half of the URL's utilize the first keyword phrase of the home page title, "Maine Resorts."  Predominately, I find them used on the Accommodations pages (pages that describe each room with a picture) which I would label as deeper pages and non-conversion type pages.  The page titles themselves are not exact duplicates of the Home Page Title but might read something like "Maine Resorts, Company Name, Accommodation Listing." My concern is that the heavy use of "Maine Resorts" as the first phrase in over 200 plus pages might be competing against the home page and pulling the home page ranking down. Thanks for any help given!

    | hawkvt1
    0

  • My dilemma For example: If I have a website ranking at number 11 for (Keyword) and there is a site named www.(Keyword).com ranking at number 12 for (Keyword), if I were to buy this site and redirect to my own site, would this be at all beneficial? Any advice would be much appreciated!

    | CMoore85
    0

  • I've set up a new online store and prepping to roll out. I've implemented Amazon Cloudfront to host all of my static files:  images, style sheets, javascript files and small template related images to assist in speeding up this Magento site. Any reason not to do this? What are the SEO implications of having images that arent' stored on the same domain? Does it make a difference if I refer to these files from the amazon cloudfront domain vs. seting up a subdomain like cdn.mywebsite.com? Thanks for any feedback.

    | Timmmmy
    0

  • So I have similar items that is being recognized as duplicated meta description. What should I do? Here is couple of items.

    | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    0

  • By Google Traductor: Hi, two questions:
    1. What about the optimization of keywords in singular and plural?Do you recommend use landing pages in the plural and singularwords? as different results on Google searches in the plural andsingular.
    2. Do you think that is a good strategy to generate a sitemap tosearch results pages based on searches by users of our site? Weplan to start generating a sitemap with a top 500 of the most popular searches and then scroll through to 1000, 2000, and more

    | romaro
    0

  • Hello, SEOmoz What would you chose for your keywords for on page optimization: sterling silver necklaces sterling silver necklaces, silver necklaces I am thinking that choice #1 would full fill it's duty, because all key words are there already, am I right?

    | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    0

  • Hi Everyone, good to be here. I'd like to do split testing in Adwords, currently with a clients site we are selling from a normal site with navigation. The site has about 5 specific products, I want to dupe one of the products and create a funnel without navigation distractions right to checkout. Then A/B test the same product pages in Adwords, one with nav and one without. Will the dupe content be ignored do you think? I'm only slightly concerned as the product pages rank well at the moment.

    | eonicWeb
    0

  • I am in my 30 day trial and very interested in my results. I think I am probably in a small minority in having the same web site up and running for approaching 17 years (registered in January 1995 :)) but only now am I looking at SEO seriously (to the extent that I want to learn more myself, as opposed to having others promise great fortune!)). Anyway, before committing to SEOMoz on an ongoing basis I want to understand just how actionable the information on my dashboard is. With that in mind, here's the first of what is (hopefully) a series questions that about low-hanging fruit I might be able to check off quickly. I recently brought up a new blog on WordPress.com (note - hosted by WordPress, not a self-hosted implementation). I have had this blog running for less than a month and have just 18 posts. And I am being overwhelmed with thoudands of errors/warnings from SEOMoz. These fall into a few categories: Duplicate content: As I understand it, each TAG I associate with a single blog post creates a unique URL. For example, if I have a single post with tags for "flowers", "wine" and "cakes", I get URLs generated such as <blog url="">/flowers, <blog url="">/wines and <blog url="">/cakes. Obviously, tagging posts is a common scenario. Must I just accept these duplicate content warnings?</blog></blog></blog> Title element too long: These are self generated by WordPress.com and the default format includes the date the post was submitted (which takes a bunch of characters followed by the title used). Many of the posts are well over 70 and this seems really easy to do. Missing meta-description: As far as I can tell, Wordpress.com doesn't give me an option to specify these. So, must I just accept these issues if I use WordPress.com (which, again, seems like a very common scenario) and how negative is this to me? Thanks. Mark

    | MarkWill
    0

  • Hi everyone, Quick question: Is it better to have your jpg name and alt text slightly different to your keywords for that particular page, or is it better to have them slightly differently? At the minute I'm doing them all with a variation on the keyphrase I want to optimize for (long tail and all that...). Any input much appreciated!

    | CMoore85
    0

  • Say I'm optimizing a website for a Veterinarian in North York, a neighborhood in Toronto. Is it important to use Toronto in the keywords/ keyword phrases? When people from within Toronto search for "North York Veterinarian" and "North York Dog Kennel" I want to be found. If I optimize a page for the keyphrases "North York Veterinarian" and "North York Dog Kennel" and only mention Toronto once in the footer with the office address will that be enough for Google to serve up these results in Toronto? Thanks,
    Jason

    | OptioPublishing
    0

  • Google no longer lets users pull an iframe of places reviews. I can't find a plugin for wordpress that will do this either. Any suggestions on how to show Google places reviews on your website? Or... should we blow it off and just go with yelp / City Search reviews?

    | John_Ellis
    0

  • I'm sure this question must have been asked before but I can't find it. I'm assuming that the title tag is far more important than the page's url.  Is that correct?   Does the url have any relevance to Google?

    | rdreich49
    0

  • Reading around the web, there are many sources that suggest all images should have an Alt tag attributed to them.  This is good for accessibility etc, however there appears to be conflicting interests between this and what works for SEO.  Hence many other sources suggest that you include a keyphrase or two in 1 image Alt tag, and then leave the rest blank so as not to dilute the alts on the page. In my experience, the latter appears to be true.  However this seems wrong when the Alt attribute really should be used for accessibility reasons and not for SEO - why would the search engines encourage us to provide poorer quality information by harming our rankings if we try to make a website accessible? Interested to hear your opinions and experiences on this subject. Thanks.

    | RiceMedia
    0

  • Hi From an SEO perspective is it better to have 1 large listed menu - over 100 internal links - or say a much smaller menu split into say 10 categories - so 10 links.
    This menu would be appearing on nearly all pages but not the home page In terms of the user experience, in my case, I have a feeling having 1 large menu is possibly preferable as it reduces the number of clicks the user makes to get to the desired information and categorisation can be a bit subjective, but i'd like some advice from an SEO perspective. Thanks

    | joeprice
    0

  • Is a h1 tag wrapped image with a optimized alt tag as effective as text wrapped in a h1 tag?

    | EAOM
    0

  • Hello, We need advice about seo for website  http://www.oluadeonline.com/ The keywords provided are - Make Money Online, Online Services, Work At Home, Online Money, Online Business, Online Work Its seems impossible to rank the site for these keywords as there is too much competition

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Our client has a site, we'll say it's delicious-lemonade.com (That's an example.) Their brand name, however, is PowerSky. (That's an example, but the point is that it's the name of a technology, and has NOTHING to do whatsoever with being a drink. Someone would never guess what the product was, by the brand name.) The client has this domain name for a long time. The domain name itself is a top keyword for their product. We are building a new site for the client and have planned to use the brand name (PowerSky) as the primary domain, so PowerSky.com, with the product page being PowerSky.com/Delicious-Lemonade. And we are planning to redirect Delicious-Lemonade.com to PowerSky.com. However, we are concerned about the SEO hit the site is going to take. What recommendations can you make in this situation?

    | grayloon
    0

  • Hello all. If I have 10 links on a menu linking to 10 different pages, and 10 links on the footer linking to the same pages, does PageRank get divided by 10 or 20?

    | MiamiWebCompany
    0

  • Hi, I have lots of duplicate stuff and I need a better site architecture. http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ We are selling furnace filters. All furnace filters are sold in 50 different sizes, each sizes comes in 3 different qualities, Bronze, Silver and Gold. Total: 150 products. Right now I have created many categories and subcategories for furnace filters sizes. When the client pickup is sizes, he will end-up to the products page with 3 different options, Bronze, Silver and Gold. They can then compare the filter a select the one he wants to purchase. The problem is, it is not possible to provide different content for each filters, Gold has a description, Silver has another one and also Bronze. The only text that will change in the descriptions, is the filter size. This makes Duplicates text description. Not good when you what to index your site. The positive things to 150 different products, is the page title. example 16x25x4 furnace filters. Those exacte tem get search in Google. A new site architecture with 3 categories, Gold, Silver and Bronze & 50 variables by products (filters sizes) might not be the best options, because no filter size will be index. Can you please help me to find the best architecture in a SEO point of view? Also what about the top navigation bar menu, what is the best options in using it? Right now it is use for Legal, Contact, Policy and I fill it is a wast, those page only get less then 1% clicks. It might be more convenient to use those for categories for example, what is your recommendations in a SEO point of view? Can I create a information page in the left navigation menu and includ all the standard page, like: Policy, Legal ... If I do, will I get penalize by Google? Thank you for your help. We have puts lots of money in AdWords before, but now the next step is to come home organics. I'm using SEOmoz tools, read there new book, and I want increase traffic. I just need your help. Thank you, BigBlaze

    | BigBlaze205
    0

  • I have a site that promotes a single affiliate product. Would it be better to have a "buy" button in the content that goes straight to the external affiliates website or should I send it all to an internal page that redirects thus only having 1 external link to the product site.

    | jafabel
    0

  • Suppose a website is devoted to a selling a modest number of products that are sold under one brand name. For example, the site might have product pages for Chevy Camaro, Chevy Suburban, and Chevy Volt, and many other pages related to Chevy.  Chevy is in the domain name and on virtually every page.  Competitors are also selling Chevy's and you want to rank well on the keyword "Chevy". One SEO rule is limit a keyword to one optimized page, and if it appears on other pages, minimize the use of the keyword on other pages, and pass links to the optimized page.  However, it can be really challenging to write prose without using the brand name, particularly if the brand name is of the form "brand training method" or "brand learning center".  The other pages can't say "training method" or "learning center".  They need to say "brand training method", etc. What are the tactics to rank for a brand name when it appears on virtually every page? Best,
    Christopher

    | ChristopherGlaeser
    0

  • We offer Wellness programs for dogs and cats. A lot of the information is the same except for specifics that relate to young vs. senior pets. I have these different pages: Senior Wellness Kitten Wellness Puppy Wellness Adult Wellness Can each page have approx. 75% of the same text? Or should I rewrite each page so the information (though the same) appears unique.

    | PMC-312087
    0

  • A long time ago I created a forum (Invision Power Board) and it got full of spam. Massive amounts! /forum/ I've now deleted the forum but the spam pages are still indexed on Google. Can I do something else to hurry up the process to get ride of them?

    | ocarlsson
    0

  • My website has a link to our help desk. I was considering a 'do not follow' since I don't think it should be included. However, are there any benefits to including it since there are A LOT of articles and pages on our help desk (though it's aimed at our curent customers, not new or potential customers)?

    | flightoffice
    0

  • Does it serve any purpose if we omit robots.txt file ?  I wonder if spider has to read all the pages, why do we insert robots.txt file ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Hi Everyone, I am really new to the SEO world (having come from paid search), so if this is a stupid question, I apologize. I noticed in Webmaster Tools that the top 25 keywords or so that Google thinks my site is about are keywords pulled from our references pages. Our site has a ton of authoritative content, most of which have corresponding reference pages with overlapping sources. Is this a problem? I am a little concerned that the keywords Google thinks are the most relevant to my site are really the least relevant. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks! nina

    | dirigodev
    0

  • How important it is for seo to install a site on a top level directory vs deeper directory? example: www.mysite.com VS www.mysite.com/catalog many eCommerce scripts such as oscommerce and cre loaded will install by default to /catalog and that's what I've been doing for most of my customer. does it mean it will be harder for them to get good seo results? Thanks in advance for the input...

    | zigi
    0

  • Hi good folk of SEOmoz, I've recently updated a number of place pages for my client who is an estate agent. I have to admit that they were a little keyword stuffed, but at the time my competitor; who ranks first, was filled with keywords. For example in their title it states "[company name] estate agent [location]" I thought that this was a big no-no and it should not be done? They also have keywords stuffed into categories and description. Im confused on how they are getting away with this? I have searched on the Google place page support forum and can not find a definitive guide on the exact rules. Could anybody be so kind to help me out? i.e Where to put keywords and locations in the title and categories Thankyou.

    | Lakeside
    0

  • Hello there, we are creating the new content for a website. For each web page we have created a “Pages file” to have the advantage of the spell checker. For each page, in the “Pages file” we have written the title tag (70 characters) and the meta description (155 character), so we have a kind of “template” like this in every page: title tag meta desciption text content (included the alt of the images inside the text) Every page is optimized for a single keyword/keyword phrase. What we wanna know from you guys if does exist a kind of “best practice” to test keyword density to avoid keyword stuffing penalities. In our case we opted to use “Pages” as editor, does exist a “standard Numbers/Excel spreadsheet” to understand if a keyword is over optimized in a page and so might look spammy? And in your opinion guys, what’s the best way to standardize the process of creating optimized content? Take care and thank you in advance for sharing your experience. YESdesign guys.

    | YESdesign
    0

  • Chrome supports prerendering whereas Firefox supports prefetching. So, can i include both of them to speed up the performance of the website in Chrome and Firefox? Is the below code right?

    | SoftzSolutions
    0

  • I have a Magento ecommerce site that allows customers to compare products.  When SEOmoz crawled the site, it came back with over 6,000 302 redirect errors related to the compare products feature.  Is this harming our rankings? And any suggestions on the best way to fix it?

    | AmazingPlans
    0

  • Before hiring me to do SEO, a client re-launched their site and did not 301 the old URLs to the new. Only the home page URL stayed the same. For a month after the re-launch, the old URLs returned a 404. For the next month, all 404 pages (basically any non-existent URL) were 301'd to the home page. Finally, 2 months after launching, they properly 301'd the old URLs to the new. Now, the new URLs are not ranking well. I assume it's too late to realize any benefit from the 301's, just checking to see if anybody has any insight into how long Google keeps trying to crawl old/404/improperly 301'd URLs. Thanks!

    | AndrewMiller
    0

  • I re-wrote the page title of a home page for a site I'm working on and made sure it's under 70 characters (68 to be exact) to comply with best practices and make sure it doesn't get cut-off in the SERPS.  It's still getting cut-off though and right when it gets to the brand/website name.  Does a "-" have anything to do with it?  Does that translate to an elipsis? Format: keywords - website/brand.com Can anybody tell me why this would be happening?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0

  • I'm having trouble interpreting this data. It says several of my blog pages have too many on page links, some as high as 140 and there is no example of a blog post that they are referring to. What am I missing? I never post more than a handful (5-7) in our 600-1000wd blogs. When I drill down, it doesn't give me very much information except "Found over 41 years ago" off to the right. When I click on the "too many on page links" URL, it provides a long list of website pages that are renamed with the blog name. huh? A lot of this stuff isn't very intuitive, SEOMoz.

    | amandahx2
    0

  • Hello, I need advice regarding design ( current design as well as any changes ) and seo advice as to what we should do to promote the site. The site in question is - Allkindofessays.com Thanks

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Hi, Which do you think is more powerful ito SEO rankings for my domain? Should I make the blog part of my domain or should I create a blog on a seperate domain? Zane

    | Springboks
    0

  • Whether you look at zappos.com, bol.com, or other e-commerce websites you will almost always see a footer that is full of links to categories & subcategories. These elements aren't really attractive, and to be honest, I don't think I ever clicked on one of those links because most of the time I don't reach the bottom of such pages. Why do these companies use these kinds of footers? Is it for SEO purpose,? Are those links passing juice? Aren't those links at the bottom of the page and therefore not that relevant as other links used in paragraphs? Aren't they contributing to too many on-page links? Maybe only use it on homepage? I'm really looking forward to the opinions of the experts here at the forum...

    | jbrabants
    0

  • My question is about my content strategy regarding keywords and page creation. For this example I will use the following keywords: "widget financing" "widget leasing" "widget loans" "thingy financing" "thingy leasing" "leasing loans" "whatchamacallit financing" "whatchamacallit leasing" "whatchamacalit loans" You get the idea. Now I have created a separate page for each of these keywords. There are about 70 keywords and their respective pages. Although all of these describe the same thing I have re-written each page. In other words I didn't use the same content and just substituted the keywords. Each page is roughly 200 to 500 words. I do rank very well for most of these keywords. I would post some of the pages from my site here but I didn't know if that is frowned on. My fear/concern is will I get in trouble in a "post Panda" world. Again, the pages rank very well I just want to be in good graces with Google going forward.

    | leaseman
    0

  • I'm trying to use the On-Page report card and it's saying that my rel=canonical is wrong, I've looked and I can't see anything wrong with it, am I missing something? The url is www.harrisonlighting.co.uk/childrens-lights.html

    | HarrisonLighting
    0

  • we're recommended 100 links or less on one page. is the 100 links including header and footer links?

    | jallenyang
    0

  • I have created one campaign for my website on SEOmoz. I found Rel Canonical issue for following 2 URLs. I can not understand that, what is error with that? Can any one help me to solve it? http://vistastores.com/blog/?p=1 http://vistastores.com/blog/?page_id=2

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • I want to define best structure of Title Tag and Meta Description for my eCommerce website. There are too many categories over there and many be increase in near future. There are 7K+ products live on website so, it's quite hard to develop Title Tag and Meta Description for all product pages. That's why I have set automatic Title Tag and Meta Description creation with help of developers. I want to do similar stuff for my category pages. Can anyone suggest me structure of Title Tag and Meta Description which suppose to help me in well over Google's organic result. I have define structure as follow. Title Tag: Category Name: FREE Shipping & Discount Category Name | Vista Stores Meta Description: Category Name with FREE shipping, 100% price guarantee, Buy and save 20% to 40% on attractive, modern and discount Category Name. Meta Keywords: Category Name I also want to give real time example with specific URL. (http://www.vistastores.com/69_21/outdoor/patio-umbrellas.html) Category Name = Patio Umbrellas so with help of above structure Title Tag and Meta Description will be as follow. Title Tag: Patio Umbrellas: FREE Shipping & Discount Patio Umbrellas | Vista Stores Meta Description: Patio Umbrellas with FREE shipping, 100% price guarantee, Buy and save 20% to 40% on attractive, modern and discount Patio Umbrellas. Meta Keywords: Patio Umbrellas So, Does it matter for good performance? If any inputs in same direction so I am eager to read it.

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • We have links to our key pages at the top of the website:- Home Our Services Work Examples About Us But we have many more pages than this. In the footer of the website we have additional links to the individual services and pages such as FAQs and Customer Feedback. Does having the links here lessen their effectiveness in terms of SEO?

    | AndieF
    0

  • Ok I did a search and didn't see an answer to this exact question.  Most of them were about if a blog should be in a sub folder and not the blog posts themselves... so here it goes.  I have a blog on my website the blog itself is in /blog/ but the blog posts themselves are situated in the root folder so it looks something like mydomain.com/cool-seo-blog-post/ Is there any reason I should change this and make it read mydomain.com/blog/cool-seo-blog-post/

    | jaybrn1
    0

  • I'm lookng at some templates on templatemonster for wordpress.  Does this one have to much going on to be good for seo?  Thanks http://livedemo00.template-help.com/wordpress_34468/

    | Medallion
    0

  • Should I add NOFOLLOW to the links in the footer of my site like "about us", "Contact us" etc because they are in the footer they are on every page so would this harm SEO in any way?

    | HarrisonLighting
    1

  • I run quote a niche website that's been running since late 1999 and over that time I've built up something like 4000 resources which consist of either text articles or image galleries and reviews along side another few thousand news stories relating to the niche interest.  On top of the main site I also have a forum which isn't especially optimised for SEO and I was wondering, whilst was cleaning it up, whether anyone has any tips / suggestion / best practices for forum SEO. Because it is all UGC the quality of the posts can be quite weak so I was wondering whether I should block robots completely from the forum, which seems a little harsh, whether I should let the whole forum be spidered (which seems a little excessive and potentially a bad thing) or whether I should restrict things to that only the main index and perhaps one page of topics and their posts be accessible to robots and then nofollow the rest? Any thoughts?

    | StevenMapes
    0

  • My online store home page, Furnace Filters Canada has 3 keywords with good ranking in google.ca keywords: ''furnace filters canada'' rank #1 position in google.ca keywords: ''furnace filters'' and ''furnace filter'' are on 5 or 6th position of page 1 in google.ca Those keywords are bringing most of the traffic to our site. To achieve this ranking, I had to use the On-Page Keyword Optimization, tool from seoMoz Questions: It is possible for me to create a page with the URL: https://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/Furnace-Filters or https://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/Furnace-Filter Can this improve my ranking with keywords like, ''furnace filters'' and ''furnace filter''? Is this a waist of time? If I decide to create a new page for optimization with, do I have to create one for singular and another one for plural? Creating a new page also mean removing, '' Furnace Filter'' in the home page title, until the new pages are index, I'm afraid to loss that 5th position in Google. Should I leave the home page title like it is now, '' Furnace Filter - Furnace Filters Canada - Online Shopping Store NOTE: we only do business in Canada, that is why Google.ca is more important to us Thank you, Jean Nichols

    | BigBlaze205
    0

  • I noticed one of the negatively correlated ranking factors was length of URL.  I'm building a page from scratch, we are trying to rank for 'Minneapolis Fitness' and 'Minneapolis Massage'. Is www.minnnepolismassageandfitness.com  just ridiculously long?  Or does the exact match outweigh the penalty for URL length?

    | JesseCWalker
    2

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.